This won’t end well
Jamaica Observer
EUROPEAN technology entrepreneur and inventor Brayden Olson is betting big on Jamaica.
The Spiritus Inc founder believes the island has major potential to benefit from the globally expanding psychedelic marketplace.
To this end, Olson’s company — which developed and currently markets a proprietary ability to stabilise the compound psilocin in natural psychedelic mushrooms — is making a multimillion-dollar investment in both retail and research partnerships locally.
“We are a bold company and started with a bold vision, so I will make a bold statement, which is that when people are right about things that ultimately breakthrough in the biopharma space, the impact is Gross Domestic Product (GDP) level,” Olson declared in a recent interview.
He pointed to the success of European health-care company Novo Nordisk and its popular diabetes care drug Ozempic as a prime example.
“Novo Nordisk has created so much economic value that its market capitalisation exceeds the total GDP in its home country Denmark [by] some years,” he said.
Having submitted a requested letter of introduction to the Ministry of Health and Wellness during the import permit process, and submitting a comprehensive plan in order to secure import incentives from the Ministry of Industry, Investment and Commerce who regulate this industry, Olson is in the midst of setting up production equipment in a St Andrew facility.
“We are about a week or so from becoming fully operational. It’s been a very long process to get to this point; we started our research here over a year ago,” he detailed of the plan now under way.
Industrial sterilisation and pharma-grade purity testing equipment tell the story of how seriously Spiritus takes safety and the opportunity at hand.
The 37-year-old entrepreneur and his team plan to undertake local research that can continue to position Jamaica as a global leader in the space, alongside launching the Spiritus stabilised mushroom product to market in Jamaica by end of month.
The primary target demographic is the tourist sector, through dispensaries and gift shops.
Spiritus received a waiver under the Ministry of Industry, Investment and Commerce’s Product Input Relief (PIR) that incentivises select overseas-based ventures, with local economic building potential, that are seeking to establish businesses in the island.
“We are very grateful to have the incentive as this will help us accelerate our efforts in supporting local research and student programmes. It’s a great way of fostering ventures like ours who want to come here,” he explained.
His breakthrough, which took three years to refine, started “with the premise that you could stabilise free-base psilocin, the compound naturally found in [magic] mushrooms”.
After dozens of trials and errors Spiritus Inc, working with Australian clinical research organisation Mayne Pharma, came to “eventually find something that was working that, in and of itself, was a miracle”.
Olson said the distinctive mark of success came in developing a stabilised product that was not only stable, but ultimately did not even require refrigeration. Typically, the psilocin compound degrades within two hours of exposure to light, heat or oxygen.
“We did our stability studies, and then we took it out of the refrigerator and we were floored. There were multiple, extremely talented formulation chemists on the project — and basically all of us were surprised that we had shelf-stabilised,” the entrepreneur said.
The third-party stability studies on the Spiritus product lasted for three months during which, according to Olson, “there is no observed degradation whatsoever, and we, therefore, anticipate further studies will show long-term stabilisation beyond a year”.
Business interest in Jamaica for Olson solidified based on the existing regulatory framework for the mushroom sector.
“In this dimension, Jamaica is ahead of the world,” he hailed, pointing to the island not initiating policies emerging from the Convention on Psychotropic Substances in 1971.
“Countries all over the world signed, and Jamaica did too, but when they came back they never ratified, so the island is this unique place where mushrooms [and the psilocybin in them] have been legal continuously,” he noted.
